When I was fourteen, my mother told me we were going to move to Los Angeles. She was tired of waiting around to get tenure at the university she taught at, and she missed California. My father had died three years before, and since then the apartment that I had grown up in had begun to take on a life of its own. Right after his funeral, in fact, it started having plumbing problems, causing water, smelling suspiciously like shit, to flow down our hallway, which made my mother cry. A year later, we got a note from the city saying that they were going to be revamping the sewage system on our street, and the noise made it impossible to sleep properly for months on end. The final straw was when our upstairs neighbor died in his apartment.
Nobody knew who he was, or where he went during the day, and so nobody thought it unusual when they hadn’t seen him for weeks on end. Eventually, the smell became so bad that my mother called the police, and they carried the guy out on a stretcher. “I’m tired of this city,” my mother said. “I don’t want to die that way.” I had to agree. I had lived in New York my whole life, and I was tired of the endless complications that we had with our landlord, complications which would have been solved had my lawyer father still been alive, but which now so overwhelmed both my mother and me that we acquiesced to whatever demands the owner of the building made of us, big or small. Compromise. This was how we got by in those strange years after Dad–or Daddy, as I had still been calling him the year his health began to fail–died.
My mother got a job at U.C.L.A, a tenure track position, and we decided to make the best of things by driving out there instead of taking a plane. I tried to be cheerful during the drive, but the truth was by the third night I was both restless and cranky. My rear end hurt from sitting for so long, and I had decided I didn’t like the southwest–it looked like the surface of the moon. This may have accounted for the fact that, when my mother took me to look at the Grand Canyon in Arizona on that five-day journey, I failed to grasp how impressive it was. Instead what I was thinking of–amidst red rocks, vast sky–was how nice it would feel to jump. My death would be ruled an accident, and I would become part of the legions of tourists who died in idiotic ways, out of their own ignorance, their cocksureness, their belief that they could actually stand up to the landscape they were in. But then I thought, what about my mother? And so I smiled and pretended to be impressed. I don’t know how convincing I was, because Mom gave me the silent treatment that evening in the hotel, probably on account of my sullen attitude. I was already seriously regretting leaving everything behind in New York.
Originally, I’d been happy about the move. I felt that New York had nothing left to offer me, and I did a lot of research about Los Angeles, actually. I read about William Mulholland and the aqueduct and the St. Francis dam disaster, and I watched Chinatown, although on principle I refrained from watching films directed by men accused of rape. At any rate, I thought very highly of the movie, and I was pleased by the fact that I was going somewhere that should never strictly have existed in the first place. This was California, the place where my mother had grown up and had fled from, shortly following the O.J. Simpson trial. It wasn’t because of the trial that she’d left L.A. but talking about it still upset her.
“A failure of justice,” my father would say. “When the law isn’t better than the people, nothing gets done.”
“He killed her,” my mother would say. “And they couldn’t pin it on him because the LAPD was racist and all they wanted to do was put a black guy in jail. It mattered more to them to lock people like him up than whether or not that woman was actually murdered.” The possibility of such a thing happening again, however unlikely, both repelled and intrigued me. For in L.A., perhaps, there was that possibility. The dark and winding roads, the palm trees, the silent sprinklers, as if all at once the residents of the city had agreed that drought only occurred during the daytime. Still, terror could not be rare, even in the most pristine of environments; hadn’t I heard of the Mansons?
But it was 2017 now, and I was only fourteen, and Los Angeles, to me, was defined by La La Land and #MeToo, so I wasn’t too concerned. I should have been, but when my mother sang to me, L.A is a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car; In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star, I felt something approaching hope, although I would soon miss public transportation, and I had no intention of going into show business.
We settled into a neighborhood of condominiums not far from campus. They were pale orange stucco and had red tile roofs. There were palm trees everywhere, and I didn’t realize until later that the name of the complex–Hacienda Apartments–was redundant. Later, the building, with its faux-mission architecture and its strategically placed cacti, seemed to me to be a spectacular example of the poor taste and confused goodwill that were the making of white Californian aesthetics, that predominated in the west simply because people didn’t know any better, because no one had taught them that counterfeit could never be real, that make-believe was just that.
But in that moment, I was glad for the sunshine and glad to forget the silence of the journey my mother and I had made across the country. While she set the place up, I went and swam in the pool–absenting myself, as usual, when she needed my help. Unpacking boxes and pushing furniture around, I would become sweaty, I would feel heavy and lumpen and useless, and I thought it better to let Mom do things to her liking. I did that a lot in those days, partially because I felt that unhappiness was contagious and also because I really was quite lazy, even for a teenager. The pool had indigo tiles at the bottom, making the water look unnaturally blue, and the sunshine was so blinding that my eyes hurt. I slipped in and held my breath until my ears began to pop, then sprang upwards, knowing that something still compelled me to surface no matter the troubles that occupied my mind.
Floating in the water, I remembered my father–lovingly, with one of those huge and completely unprecedented stabs of pain I’d become used to in the past few years. It was he who had taught me to swim and to lie on my back like this, he who’d taught me to look at the sky once in a while–just so you know your proportion, he’d said. How tiny we are in comparison to the cosmos. He’d always been fascinated by outer space. I, on the other hand, was not, and had been terrified watching Apollo 13 with him, long ago. All that empty black space, a silence encircling the earth as a permanent reminder of your own nothingness.
Was that what it was like to die? To stare into the abyss, to know that not even your sense of self could prevent the fact that one day your existence would mean nothing, would come to an end as unceremoniously as, say, a palm frond snapped off from the tree above me and fell into the pool? Thoughts like this disquieted me. For years after Dad’s death I had to avoid the films he’d loved, the places he’d loved, because I found that when I saw them or went to them it seemed to me unjust that he wasn’t there. Like a fool, I’d keep expecting to see him, and when the film was over, or when it was time to go, it was as if he’d died all over again.
A little while later I started school, and immediately found that my jeans and black t-shirts made me look even paler than I actually was. I seemed to be the only dark-haired girl in a sea of blond heads, and I thought I’d never felt more out of place in my life. This, as I was soon to learn, would be a recurring sensation. Indeed, my first great failing my freshman year of high school was almost entirely due to my lack of California social capital. On the first day, a girl named Julie Bazos was assigned to show me around and to make me feel welcome. She was pretty in the way that girls are supposed to be: blond hair, blue eyes, L-bracket figure. She was wearing a paper flower crown on her head. I thought this might be for a celebration of some sort, but in case it wasn’t I kept my mouth shut. In New York you could only wear such things ironically, and even that was pushing it.
“Julie,” a boy said as we sat down at the lunch table, “You look fresh from Coachella.”
“I’m not, though,” she said, grinning. “I’m actually so tired of it. The line-up last April was kind of lame.”
“When one is tired of Coachella,” some smart-ass sitting near us said, “One is tired of life.”
“Samuel Johnson,” I said.
“What?” Julie said.
“When one is tired of London, one is tired of life. That’s the guy who said it.”
“This one’s pretty smart,” the boy who had complimented Julie said, eyeing me carefully.
“What’s Coachella?” I asked. The spell was broken.
“It’s a concert,” Julie said kindly, and by that time both boys were snickering. “It’s the biggest in SoCal, actually.”
“Oh, cool,” I said.
“It’s expensive,” she said accusatorially. “The only reason I could afford it is because my brother’s in the music industry and has connections.”
“That’s interesting,” I said brightly, but I knew immediately afterward that I would be unable to salvage the conversation. As a result, I found it impossible to eat; I was actually afraid I would end up vomiting if I did so. This probably didn’t contribute positively to their impression of me, but what the hell. Anyway, Julie must have decided then and there to ignore me. Our interactions after that were quite limited. She always greeted me in the hallway, though, and she was never rude to me–not outwardly, anyway. I was already familiar with people like her, and I was able to assuage my disappointment in the ordinariness of L.A. high school students by making a parody of her to my mother. I often did this, just to make her laugh. The more outrageous I became in my description, the prouder she became of me. I was careful to leave out the fact that I hadn’t been able to eat my lunch in Julie’s presence–I didn’t want Mom to worry, or to know about the extent of the embarrassment I had already experienced on my first day of school.
I was careful not to make it seem like I was complaining, because I wanted Mom to know how grateful I was to be in California at all; also, leaving New York, I had made it my goal to be less categorical in my assumptions about people. No matter if my assumptions did happen to be right, as they almost always were in L.A. I thought I’d never seen so much plastic surgery in one place, and made it my business to be gravely disappointed by the new home I found myself in. I was accomplishing the extraordinary feat of being unhappy in California; I yearned for red brick, rain-stained buildings, narrow streets, the grounded world from which I came.
My mother’s job was going well, however, and for the first time in three years she had begun to sing again. They were Dad’s songs, of course. Hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp, she’d croon over our weekly pot of pasta, and I’d feel an abrupt wave of rage–for how dare she steal something he’d always sung to me?–before realizing that I was supposed to be enjoying myself. But I wasn’t. I spent most of my time inside, complaining that the sunshine hurt my eyes, or that I was tired, or that I had a stomachache. After school began I started to get excruciating headaches, which, to my disappointment, weren’t severe enough to be migraines and which my doctor concluded were signs of stress.
My mother decided to take me to see a shrink, an affable, vaguely narcoleptic old gentleman who was a far cry from the energetic grief counselor we’d both had in New York. He was a good listener, but he never offered anything more constructive than, say, a Bob Dylan quote, or a recommendation to “pound the hell out of your pillow.” Or he would say things like, “You need to confront the fact that you’re angry with your mother,” and I pitied him for his illusions, his belief that problems could really be worked out through conversation. As if people had time to sit around and talk about their feelings all day. As if my mother, euphoric in our new home, could ever be persuaded that there was something wrong with me, apart from the obvious fact that I was fatherless. These were both givens now, and the fact that there was some new unhappiness in addition to those twin sorrows made my cheeks burn with shame and the sheer knowledge of my own cowardice.
It wasn’t until my end-of-trimester math exam that the panic really started kicking in. I had always been a good student, and yet during the test the numbers began to swim in my head and blink at me in the bright whiteness of fear. I worked on the exam long after I was supposed to, staying until even after the students with extra time had gone. Finally, my math teacher told me to leave, and when she gently put her hand on my shoulder as I left the room, my knees shaking, I realized that my skin was ice-cold. I was also short of breath. At home I told my mother how terrified I was of exponents, how nothing made sense to me, not even the variable x, and she decided that I needed a math tutor. I didn’t think it would help, especially since I still had an A in the class and hadn’t actually done that badly on the exam, considering. But being a lawyer’s wife, or widow, my mother was driven towards the tidiness of such solutions, and so within a matter of weeks she’d found someone to work with me.
His name was Steven Rylance, and on both the private and public-school circuits he was known as the math whisperer. He was short, at least for a man, not much taller than I was, in fact, and I never saw him wear anything other than a flannel shirt and stove-pipe jeans, which always looked the worse for wear but which had probably cost him about a third of his rent. Within days of our first session–in his home, not too far from where we livedthe panic I’d begun to experience in the math classroom had already begun to subside, and I was filled with unadulterated relief. When he sat next to me at his desk I would study the hair on his arms and on the inside of his wrists with what I thought was a complete absence of sexual curiosity.
The most terrible thing was that, if our hands happened to brush, or if his knee knocked against mine, it was as if I had touched the stovetop. I would withdraw immediately, and then scold myself, because I feared that my aversion to accidental physical contact would be a clear indicator, to him, of the embarrassing attraction I was enduring. When he spoke to me, he called me kid, which not only shattered the idiotic fantasies I had about him but prevented me from doing anything too stupid. I never knew whether or not I looked forward to or dreaded seeing him.
“You’re a funny kid, Amelia,” he would say. “But your humor can’t save you from this math problem.” And so on. Because of him I started to do better in school, and because of him a lot of the panicking on tests started to go away. Both my mother and I were relieved, chiefly because this meant that, surely, there was nothing really wrong with me, I was just an ordinary fourteen-year-old struggling to adjust to a new academic environment. Or something like that. Steve also offered to start tutoring me for the PSATs, which my mother took him up on. These, too, were sessions I enjoyed. The problems were hard at first, but once I got the hang of them I started to whip through them, and both he and I were confident that I would be ready, come the end of sophomore year–eighteen months away–to dive into the scholastic hell of standardized testing. During these sessions, I made note of his physical attributes. Eyes: green. Hair: light brown. Beard: well-trimmed. Smell: Axe body spray. De rigeur, but what could you do?
I found it strange that I was interested not in the boys at my school but in a man who was far older than me, and who almost certainly had a significant other. But who was she? I was almost entirely preoccupied by this question. I looked at his hands–no wedding ring. No pictures around the house. Even his screensaver was merely the marbled underside of an ocean wave, as green and unfathomable as his eyes were. Yes, I really did have thoughts like this, I’m sorry to say; it was quite uncharacteristic for me. A year before, in fact, I might have ridiculed him, might have dismissed him among my friends as a hairy old man. While secretly wondering, as I’m sure we all did, about his life story, about whether he’d always intended to be a math teacher, or, like many people in L.A., had wanted to be in the music or the film industry and had then found out that it was an unbearable way to try to make a living.
Because of Steven, breathing began to hurt a lot less, and a delightful peace, if not happiness, seemed to come over me then. I don’t have to tell you that this didn’t last long. One day at the end of the tutoring session he went down to talk to my mother in the foyer, as he often did. Restless, I walked to the window overlooking the broad, sun-bleached street, where my mother usually parked her car. I saw him approach her and watched with mild interest as he put his hands in his pockets, almost modestly. There was a springiness to the way he moved, an eagerness that seemed boyish. My mother, shorter than him, lifted her face up to his, and he kissed her. Mom, lovely and dark-haired. Kissing my math tutor. Okay. I tried to ignore the dropping sensation in my stomach, and when they came upstairs to fetch me I pretended to be absorbed in making sure I had everything in my backpack. My mouth was dry, and when he said goodbye my reply came out hoarsely; I had to clear my throat.
“See you soon, Mr. Rylance,” I said.
“You can call me Steven.” I had already decided that I wouldn’t. Not out loud.
“You alright?” my mother asked me, as I slid into the passenger’s seat.
“Yup. Just tired.” She lifted her hand up and touched my cheek so gently that I couldn’t bear to say anything. I didn’t for a while, actually. I was afraid of the terrible thoughts running through my head. An unrealistic, completely childish feeling of betrayal. Stupidity. How could I not have gauged that they were sleeping with one another? At the end of our sessions he almost always sprang out the door to buzz her in, like a boy. See you soon, kid.
I told myself that, after all, my father had been dead for more than three years now, that Mom had a right to it. But I started working out a plan gradually, tried to figure out how I could taper off the lessons without making it apparent that I knew about them. I used the success of my next two math tests as a reason to stop seeing him. I said that I felt confident, that I was prepared to study on my own now–this was true. I also joined the tennis team, which delighted my mother, who thought I was making friends. Incredible, the lengths to which I was going to hide my knowledge. I knew that as soon as she brought it up, I would utter the unforgivable. Her unhappiness had once been a burden to me; now her happiness was. Suddenly I was the negative one, she the ray of sunshine. Things were not as they should have been. Also, she was older than him. By a lot. (Actually, she was forty-four to his thirty-six, but in my fourteen-year-old mind they may as well have been Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron. I realize now that this line of thinking was probably sexist).
When Mom finally did tell me about them, I had to pretend to be surprised. I could tell she was taken aback by how mature I seemed to be about it, and I was proud of my deception. She looked at me differently after that, she trusted me more. Let me learn to drive. Celebrated when I got my permit, then my license. Whenever Steven came over, I made sure I was out of the house. I thought, too, that as long as I avoided seeing him, I could follow the “out of sight, out of mind” maxim that had previously worked for me. Sort of. With thoughts of my friends in New York, with thoughts of my father’s death. In the evenings, I’d drive to the Griffith Observatory or the Getty Museum, two places which continued to utterly charm me, and I’d look out at the huge and sprawling skyline and try not to imagine Mom and Steven having sex. Still, I eventually got used to his presence–for you can, after all, get used to anything–and I became accustomed to his leaving his belongings around our house.
Indeed, I was getting ready to take my shower one morning when I saw that Steven had left his phone on the toilet seat. I picked it up and looked at it–couldn’t help it. He was stupid enough not to put a lock on it, so what did he expect? I stared at the screensaver for a second, and then I pulled up his contacts. Which is when I saw it.
Madeline Gresham. (Wifey).
Madeline Gresham was not my mother. My mother was named Lynn Becker. My brain was so frozen in that moment that I hardly realized when Mom came barging in, when she saw me with his phone. Ready to reproach me for invading someone else’s privacy, she snatched it from my hands, and saw what ought to have been obvious to both of us, saw what I’d secretly hoped for but was now shocked by. Yet when she burst into tears, something turned over inside me, some knot in my chest which I’d been ignoring for months seemed to uncoil. I am ashamed, even now, of my own cruelty.
“What did you expect?” I hissed. “Come on, Mom, he’s practically a–a boy compared to you. Didn’t you think it would come to this?” She slapped me then, something she’d never done before or since. I’m sorry to say that I slapped her back. She shoved me, and I fell back against the toilet, had my arm jammed between the whiteness of the seat and the whiteness of the counter. She started crying, and instead of pitying her tears, instead of rising to the occasion as I should have done–for when had I ever done that? Certainly not when my father was dying; I’d been completely useless–I stormed out of the room.
Mom found out, in short order, that Madeline Gresham was indeed the wife of Steven Rylance. According to him, she traveled a lot for work. They hadn’t been getting along, not in recent months. He was thinking of separating from her. He was in love with my mother, Lynn Becker, not his wife(y). He wanted to be a part of her life. Couldn’t she understand that? My mother, being a moral person, could not. Son of a bitch. Fucking dick. Little shit. I’d never heard her say those things before, and I never did again. In spite of my anger, I was impressed by the ferocity of her emotions, and I felt guilty for underestimating how hard she would take the betrayal. And yet she marched off to work in the mornings, did my mother, ever elegant in her suits, her dark hair perfectly blown dry, her makeup gently applied–elegant and simple, not frosted on like most of the other mothers I saw in Los Angeles. They stopped seeing each other. He called her a lot, for about a month, and when, her mouth flaming with legal jargon–no doubt picked up from her years married to a lawyer, and from her own not inconsiderable knowledge of the law–she threatened to report him to the police for harassment, he stopped.
I was struck, then, by how suddenly helpless my mother appeared to me. At the time, fool that I was, I refused to pity her. I sat in front of her–hard, withholding, cruel–as she told me of her anguish, as her sorrows poured out in front of me. I couldn’t help thinking that I ought to have been in her place: that it was my heart that should have been broken by Steven, in one way or another. If only I’d been ten years older. The acute shame of my crush, I think, prevented me from expressing my own disbelief that he could have done something like that. Instead I was cold, I was dismissive: I hardened myself to her. My behavior astonished both of us. I still regret it. I think must have been angered by the adolescent quality of her love for him, perhaps because, being comparatively young, I had never fallen for anybody. It seemed to me that such schoolgirlish desperation was not befitting of an educated, successful woman like herself. Such childish sorrows ought to have belonged to me. It was I who should have been felled by the indignity of love.
After that disastrous year came to a close, I began to make friends at school–quite suddenly. We listened to records together and pretended to be ironic when we agreed that vinyl really did allow for a better listening experience when it came to music. We bitched freely about Donald Trump, pretending that we didn’t know anyone who’d voted for him, and watched with idle awe as Hollywood mogul after Hollywood mogul was “taken down”, as people said in those days, by sexual abuse allegations. I thought that they made Steven Rylance, the gentlest of philanderers, look like a day at the beach. Some of my friends’ parents knew those men, too. How fallible everybody had suddenly become: I didn’t realize that this was because I was growing up. I thought myself cynical, and behaved as if the scales had really fallen from my eyes. They hadn’t, of course–they wouldn’t, not for some time yet. For I was young and did not understand what it was to be in thrall of a man, to be in love with somebody and then have your existence together jerked from beneath your feet.
Around that time, just as I was settling in, my mother began thinking of moving us back to New York. Partially as compensation for the hell I’d given her the year before, I acquiesced to this. My heart was full at the prospect of returning, and yet when we emptied the apartment out until it was the airy little cube it had been when we first moved in, I felt disturbed. It was the part of change that I hated the most: the physical incongruities, the spatial uncertainty. But I was happy, too: that was undeniable. I didn’t belong in the sunshine, I thought; didn’t belong among people who went to Coachella and believed that non-Californians were living in homespun darkness, who believed that the idea of happiness being marketed to them by movies and music and advertising was a truth that they genuinely deserved. I was, and am still, a snotty New Yorker. On the plane going back home, I didn’t look back at the skyline of L.A. I refused to look at the Sierras, rippling upwards like great brown gouges in the earth; refused to admire the snow-capped Rockies. It wasn’t until Kansas that I realized I was crying.
Rebecca Bihn-Wallace is a studio art major and professional writing minor at the University of California, Davis. She has previously lived in Maryland and North Carolina, and moved to San Francisco with her family when she was fifteen.